MSDN Magazine - December 2007 - (Page 11) Live Chat, Code Conversion, Multiple Monitors, and More SCOTT MITCHELL I was recently visiting a hiking supply Web site searching for a particular piece of equipment. After searching in vain for several minutes, I noticed a link to chat with a sales associate. Clicking it opened a new window, allowing me to chat with a gentleman named Chad. I explained what I was looking for and, just a few moments later, got a link to the item. Such live chat functionality is becoming increasingly common on the Internet. Chat is a more responsive customer service mechanism than e-mail and more cost-effective than telephone support. Most live chat systems are sold as a service. You add a bit of HTML to your site to display the “Live Chat” link, and your customer service operators go to the service provider’s site and wait to assist visitors. The advantage of this approach is that there’s nothing to install or maintain on your site. However, such models are usually priced on the volume of customers or the number of concurrent operators, which means the price of your live chat will grow right along with your business! If you want more control over the chat system’s implementation and pricing, check out .netLIVEHELP Version 2.0 by Corporate Web Solutions. Unlike service-based systems, .netLIVEHELP ships as a series of Microsoft® ASP.NET 2.0 Web pages and Web services, along with a desktop application for operators. There’s a flat, one-time price per Web site, regardless of the number of customers or operators. Plugging .netLIVEHELP into your site is relatively straightforward: you simply create a virtual directory pointing to the folder containing the ASP.NET files and Web services. Adding a “Live Add Live Help to Your Microsoft ASP.NET Web Site Live Chat Enables More Responsive Customer Service Chat” button to a page is as easy as adding one line of HTML. When a customer initiates a chat session, the software routes the conversation to the operator with the lightest call load. The contents of the conversation are logged, as are metrics such as the customer’s browser, IP address, and the Web pages visited on the site. I was impressed with the .netLIVEHELP’s operator and administrator interfaces. The operator signs on through a desktop application containing a system tray icon that flashes when a customer has been routed there. Clicking the system tray icon opens the chat window, which includes features like spell checking and text formatting. Operators can perform chats with multiple customers simultaneously and can also track visiting customers’ current and past chats as well as the pages they’ve visited. And it is possible to integrate data from external applications, so that, for example, an operator can view the customer’s shopping cart. Administrators can perform the same functions as an operator, but can also view statistics. The statistics can be summarized across the whole company for a given date range or inspected on an operator-by-operator basis. The statistics include metrics like the total number of past and ongoing chats, average chat time, and average waiting time. Price: $395 per Web site license. dotnetlivehelp.com Quickly Convert between Visual Basic and C# Code Since all Microsoft .NET Framework applications share a common type system december2007 11 http://ASP.NET http://ASP.NET http://dotnetlivehelp.com http://ASP.NET
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